The last lush and glossy Julia Roberts film - a movie, in other
words, where she’s up there splashed on the screen, not the canned
voice of an animated character - was Ocean’s 12 two years
ago.
That caper was a male-bonding experience for the likes of Brad,
George and Matt. But the camera lingered on Pretty Woman
moments: it caught Roberts ambling coltishly in heels and tossing
her head back for her trademark cackle.
For such seemingly mundane human activity, Roberts’s small steps
and loud laughs are big-ticket items in Hollywood; like the dark
eyes and the gravity-defying grin they were part of the signature
style and body language of a certifiable screen queen: the highest
grossing female movie star in history.
It’s an understatement to note that, in the absence of another
high-yield Pretty Woman-type, the Hollywood money men have
missed her. But she’s not having any cheap, cloying sentiment
today. You need to be a celluloid supernova, sure of your orbit and
calendar co-ordinates, to take issue with whether two years amounts
to a career hiatus.
Either that or - for the busy mother of three small children
born in the past three years - time really flies. Throw turning 40
into the mix, as Roberts did three months ago, and you’re allowed a
little time/motion latitude.
“I don’t know what’s got into people today,” she says amiably
when I veer towards a welcome back-style remark. “It hasn’t been
like years and years and years and years since I’ve made a movie.
And I did do a season on Broadway in 2006. It’s not like coming
back from the dead, I just had some kids, the sort of thing women
do all the time. I have taken longer time away from acting than
these last few years.”
Obviously Roberts doesn’t want her new film, Charlie Wilson’s
War, to get put into the category of a “comeback” vehicle. Her
character is something of a departure from the usual; she’s older,
blonder and a good deal more wily than the coquettish types Roberts
has often played previously. And the film is something of a biting
social satire; it probably won’t be a hit like even a modest
Roberts vehicle from the late 1990s or early 2000s.
Says her co-star in the film, Tom Hanks: “Julia is the least
money and box-office obsessed person that I know in this business.
I think she resolved on that when huge sums of money floated around
her. But that’s not to say she doesn’t think strategically.”
Roberts and I are in a Los Angeles hotel, the ritzy Beverly
Wilshire near Rodeo Drive, and Roberts is here to promote
Charlie Wilson’s War, a kind of combined Washington satire
and morality parable. This hotel was the setting for much of the
action in Pretty Woman including Roberts in her thigh-high
boots.
She’s wearing a simple, practical wrap dress and flat, knee-high
boots and looks remarkably calm and composed: she has left
six-month-old Henry and three-year-old twins Hazel and Phinnaeus at
home with dad. The Pretty Woman stereotype, of course, is
young, footloose and fancy free. For most of her life that was
Roberts’s story, apart from her two-year marriage to Lyle Lovett in
1993. But Roberts finally fell for a cameraman, Danny Moder, on a
set. They married in 2000.
If Pretty Woman was a politically incorrect take on
conspicuous consumption, Charlie Wilson’s War is more
political. And it’s a true story. It is set in the late 1980s
against an earlier chapter entirely of the Afghanistan crisis. In
1989 the Soviets occupy the country and it falls to a womanising
and not especially ethical Texan congressman named Charlie Wilson,
played by Tom Hanks, goaded and aided by a right-wing Houston
socialite named Joanne Herring to organise covert assistance to the
country’s Muslim resistance. The freedom fighters eventually beat
the Soviets and become the country’s oppressive, fundamentalist
regime.
Joanne Herring, is similar to Roberts’s most acclaimed
portrayal, Erin Brockovich. They’re both real people, they’re both
still alive, they both became political activists, although its
doubtful they have much else in common.
In the late 1980s, Herring, then in her late 50s, was a rich,
conservative, often married Texas socialite and that, inevitably,
means the usually lustrously brunette to dark-haired Roberts is a
platinum blonde with something of a honeyed, Lone-Star twang.
Herring was born in 1929 so in the late 1980s, when the action
the film follows took place, she had to be in her late 50s or early
60s. It meant that Roberts had to do something she rarely had to do
in her Pretty Woman days: play older. Which gave her the
opportunity, she says, to ruminate on a subject that many facing 40
think about: plastic surgery. Not for herself, of course, but for
her character.
“I wanted to look as much like Joanne Herring as I could,”
Roberts says. ” She is very open about the fact that she’s had
quite a bit of cosmetic surgery. So I thought that gave me a way to
deal with the age difference. I was trying to do things with my
face to make it appear as though I was 50 but had had some work
done. I wore different tapes under my wig and tried to pull my face
in different ways. It was challenging.”
Roberts’s comeback in a political satire with a fairly acidic
point of view has enchanted some and perplexed others. In America,
they’ve been able to handle the sonorous accent just fine. Roberts
is from Georgia, got her first Oscar nod for playing a southern
belle in Steel Magnolias in 1889 and laid on the breathy
cadences again in 1995 as wronged southern wife in Something To
Talk About.
The last time Roberts departed quite so markedly from her
coltish Pretty Woman persona, all hell broke loose. And the
dreaded M-word, miscast, was conspicuous in the critical reception
of darker films like I Love Trouble (1994), Everybody
Says I Love You (1996) Mary Reilly (1996) and Michael
Collins (1996). It was quite the losing streak and Roberts only
got her mojo back when she did My Best Friend’s Wedding in
1997.
That time round it was her very likeable chemistry with British
co-star Rupert Everett, a gay man playing a gay character, that
charmed audiences back into the familiar pastures of easy, frothy
and contemporary romantic comedy.
Hollywood’s preferred take on Roberts has always been
relentlessly contemporary; virtually anything period was deemed a
bad fit: a misappropriation of her red-hot screen presence. Leave
the dowdy baroque outfits and chalky white make-up to Cate
Blanchett or Tilda Swinton; put Julia in a short skirt, a tailored
blouse and big heels so we can watch her strut her stuff for Denzel
Washington, Richard Gere or Hugh Grant.
“Getting older to me is nice,” she says. “You are released from
certain concepts. Plus, as one gets older and more complicated, the
parts that come are more interesting, complicated ones. And I’m
more intrigued by things that are so removed from my real
existence. The thing I like about my life in the past few years is
how quickly it has changed: marriage, motherhood, competing demands
on my time.
“Even turning 40 has taken care of a few issues that might have
been harder to deal with if some of the fundamentals had not
changed. I mean for one thing I can be more selective about working
and clearly I won’t make as many films as I used to be able to
do.”
Roberts certainly seems, physically and psychologically,
studiously unfazed by the arrival of what some might call middle
age. And if there is any private anguish, she’s got the poise after
20 years or more in media spotlight not to let on. Forty is, as
they say, just a number. But if anyone might have reason to take to
the booze or the Botox at the prospect of a jarring numerical
transition it would be the one-time Pretty Woman.
It’s also numbers, after all, that have been the best measure of
Roberts’s status as Hollywood’s most bankable and enduring female
star, given that the critics tend to blow hot and cold about her
skills as an artist.
Her 31 films have earned $US2.2 billion ($2.46 billion)
collectively and that includes a few experiments that made nothing.
Only a few of the big action boys such as Harrison Ford, Bruce
Willis, Tom Cruise and her current co-star, Tom Hanks, have higher
grossing resumes. Among Tinseltown’s top-paid women she’s
invariably way out in front, a one-woman inflationary spiral, but
also Exhibit A proving that women can “open” movies.
Her $US25 million in 2003 for Mona Lisa Smile, an
interesting but not particularly ground-breaking female-bonding
film set in a 1950s women’s college, is still a record. And she’s
amassed a personal fortune of $US140 million, according to
Forbes, from her high-wattage screen persona that pretty
much gelled in the public conscious with her breakout hit,
Pretty Woman, 17 years ago.
Roberts was paid $US300,000 for Pretty Woman which went
on to make close to $US400 million worldwide.
Money talks in Tinseltown and, more often than not, hers is the
first female name you come to on “power lists” in business and
trade glossies like Forbes and The Hollywood Reporter
(even while she was on maternal hiatus).
Yet Roberts has been singularly successful over two decades in
portraying herself as sensible, sane and grounded in a town full of
despotic divas. That’s probably because, for the most part, that’s
the way she is.
In a recent memoir, actor Rupert Everett described her on the
set as “a calm practical earthmother curled up on a director’s
chair in a Marilyn cardigan with knitting needles and bag of
wool”.
But Everett also discloses enough to suggest that Roberts,
particularly as a single woman, probably had to work hard to stay
centred and earth-bound as the world’s best paid movie actress. The
film, directed by Australia’s PJ Hogan, was shot in Chicago. When
it became clear that Everett and Roberts were burning up the screen
with an unexpected chemistry, Roberts would give him a ride back to
New York at weekends.
“She would give me a ride back on the Sony jet,” he wrote. “Then
I witnessed the whole machine grind into action. With a cocktail in
a cut glass, wearing a towelling robe, she would hop barefoot with
wet hair from the trailer to the car. The only baggage was the key
to her apartment and her newly acquired gay confidant [Everett].
Chatting intensely on subjects that a girl could only discuss with
a man not nursing a hidden erection, we huddled in the back of the
limo and sipped our drinks as we sped through the suburbs to a
private airport. Gates opened as if by magic and we drove towards a
huge jet in the middle of an empty airfield.”
But those days are a distant memory for Roberts. Today she
talked about potty training the twins. It’s a lot less salacious
than talking about drug abuse and drink-driving with Lindsay Lohan,
Britney Spears or Paris Hilton. “I’d like to install Britney in my
guestroom,” the earthmother says. “And feed her soup.”
Charlie Wilson’s War is released on January
24.
Source: The Sun-Herald
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